What to See in Santa Barbara, United States: Free Audio Guide

The best things to do in Santa Barbara include exploring historic adobes, visiting museums, discovering Spanish Colonial architecture, and walking from downtown to the Pacific. With the Santa Ynez Mountains behind it and the ocean ahead, the city brings together cultural history, art, marine life, and relaxed coastal scenery. Neywo offers a free audio guide for Santa Barbara with 46 narrated places.

What to See in Santa Barbara

Casa de la Guerra

Casa de la Guerra is a historic adobe residence and house museum in the heart of Santa Barbara. Built between 1818 and 1828 by José de la Guerra y Noriega, the fifth commandant of the Presidio de Santa Barbara, it became a thirteen-room social, political, and cultural center during the Mexican era.

The building was originally a one-story, U-shaped adobe with a tiled roof. José de la Guerra lived there from 1828 until his death in 1858, and his descendants remained in the house until 1943. Damage from the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake led to renovations that added wooden columns and siding, giving parts of the residence a Victorian appearance.

Mission Santa Barbara

Mission Santa Barbara, or Misión de Santa Bárbara, stands on a rise between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountains. Often called the Queen of the Missions, it was founded on December 4, 1786, by Padre Fermín Lasuén for the Franciscan order.

It was the tenth mission in the chain of twenty-one missions in Alta California. The mission gave its name to the city and county of Santa Barbara, and today it serves as a parish church of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Casa Dolores

Casa Dolores is the Center for the Study of the Popular Arts of Mexico. The museum occupies the Botiller Adobe, built in 1843 and described as the oldest standing two-story adobe in Santa Barbara.

Its collection includes more than 6,000 objects made from materials including clay, wood, ceramics, natural fibers, leather, paper, glass, and tin. The works range from pre-Hispanic pieces to contemporary art and include Talavera from Puebla, Alebrijes from Oaxaca, and Huichol art from the western highlands.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Housed in a former post office, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has brought art to the city since opening to the public in 1941. Its permanent collection spans thousands of years and includes Asian, American, and European art, with works by Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas alongside Chinese art.

Changing exhibitions add paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and work by emerging artists to the museum’s program. The building itself has expanded several times, with additions made in 1942, 1963, 1985, and 1998.

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Near the cafés and boutiques of Paseo Nuevo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, or MCASB, focuses on changing exhibitions rather than a permanent collection. Founded in 1976 as the Contemporary Arts Forum, it adopted its current name in 2012.

The museum typically presents three to five major exhibitions each year. Its bright galleries and terrazzo halls offer a setting for contemporary artistic expression in the center of downtown.

La Arcada Historic Courtyard and its galleries

La Arcada Historic Courtyard was established in 1926 in the Spanish Revival style. Tile-lined walkways, fountains, sculptures, and a distinctive clock tower create a quiet place to browse galleries, boutiques, and outdoor art.

Among the named attractions are Fazzino 3D Studio Gallery, New Dimension Art Gallery, and The Yes Store. Gallery 113 showcases original work by more than 75 artists and changes its exhibitions every month. Its artists work across painting, drawing, collage, etching, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, and photography-related processes.

Waterhouse Gallery, also located in the arcade, presents contemporary plein-air, landscape, cityscape, and figurative art.

Sullivan Goss

Sullivan Goss is an American gallery established in 1984. Its exhibitions range from nineteenth-century landscapes to contemporary work, with approximately twenty exhibitions each year.

The program includes solo shows, thematic group exhibitions, and retrospectives. The gallery represents local and nationally known artists working in styles such as plein air, tonalism, realism, abstraction, and figurative art.

Trinity Episcopal Church

Trinity Episcopal Church is one of Santa Barbara’s historic Protestant congregations. The parish began in 1867, while the present sandstone church was built between 1912 and 1919 by Philip H. Frohman, the designer of Washington National Cathedral.

Inside, a traditional nave and stained-glass windows create a bright atmosphere. The church was partly reconstructed after the 1925 earthquake, when a parish hall was added.

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History brings together the region’s landscapes, wildlife, geology, and cultural history. Founded in 1916, it has indoor galleries and outdoor spaces covering birds, insects, mammals, plants, marine life, fossils, astronomy, and geology.

The museum’s collections contain more than 3.5 million specimens, while dioramas recreate regional habitats. Its 17-acre campus extends through oak woodland along Mission Creek and includes the Museum Backyard, Nature Club House, a butterfly habitat, and the Prehistoric Forest with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs. The Gladwin Planetarium is described as the only planetarium on the Central Coast.

MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration and Innovation

MOXI is a non-profit science and children’s museum designed around hands-on exploration. It opened on February 25, 2017, with 17,000 square feet of exhibits.

Its programs emphasize STEAM education, bringing science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics together through experimentation and creative discovery.

Stearns Wharf and the Ty Warner Sea Center

Stearns Wharf reaches into the Pacific and provides the setting for the Ty Warner Sea Center, also known as the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Sea Center. The museum explores marine life in the Santa Barbara Channel and the importance of conservation.

Exhibits focus on habitats such as kelp forests, rocky reefs, and sandy bottoms. Visitors can see moon jellies, decorator crabs, and California two-spot octopuses, while hands-on areas include the Living Beach tide pool, the BioLab, the Wet Deck, and the Submerged Science Lab. A life-size gray whale and calf hang above the entrance.

Santa Barbara Maritime Museum

The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum is located in the Naval Reserve Center Santa Barbara. Its exhibits and activities introduce maritime life, the Channel Islands, and the Marine Sanctuary.

A fourth-floor mosaic depicts the islands alongside the legend of the Rainbow Bridge and native flowers. Other features include a kelp-forest mural, outdoor interpretive displays, maritime art, ship models, and films about undersea exploration and marine life in the Munger Theater.

Santa Barbara Zoological Gardens

The Santa Barbara Zoological Gardens offer a park setting in Santa Barbara County, shaped by the surrounding landscape. It provides another place to explore beyond the city’s historic buildings, galleries, and waterfront museums.

Explore Santa Barbara with Neywo

For a Santa Barbara self-guided walking tour, Neywo includes three walking tours, one bus route, and one bike route, covering 46 narrated places in total:

• Three walking tours: 2.26 km and 83 minutes with 10 stops; 4.78 km and 111 minutes with 10 stops; and 4.09 km and 111 minutes with 11 stops.
• One bus route: 9.9 km and 42 minutes with 6 stops.
• One bike route: 3.4 km and 17 minutes with 9 stops.

The free Santa Barbara audio guide tells the story of each place as you reach it, at your own pace, with no group and no schedule. Narration is available in 11 languages.

Santa Barbara is part of California in the United States. Download Neywo and explore its adobes, churches, museums, galleries, and waterfront with the city’s stories playing at the places where they happened.